Saturday night at the supermarket

It was Saturday night and the only person I knew at the time who spoke any English had other plans. I’ve since met a few Chinese girls who want to practice their English by taking me on little tours of the city, and a middle-aged colleague who wants to do the same, but at the time I was on my own for the evening.

So I decided to do a bit of exploring. There is a little shopping area across the street from the Educational District (our school is one of four small colleges that sit in a row of maybe four square blocks on the same road). It has a bunch of restaurants and shops and sidewalk food stalls that create an atmosphere that feels very Chinese and very college-town, which I suppose makes quite a lot of sense for a neighborhood in China that has four colleges across the street.

As I walked deeper into the neighborhood, it began to feel more and more like a Chinese college town. I passed dozens of sidewalk restaurants serving something in Chinese characters for 4-8 yuan (in a town like this, any meal that costs you more than a dollar, which is 7 yuan, is pretty expensive). I passed a bunch of cheap clothing shops that were surprisingly full of students at 8:00 on a Saturday night, and a tiny, outdoor roller-skating rink that was packed with students trying to skate in jeans and dressed-up tops.

And then I got to the local supermarket, which was also surprisingly full on a Saturday night. Not only was there a steady stream of shoppers entering and exiting, but a large crowd of people had gathered around a stage in front of the store. Being far too much of a journalist to pass a scene like this without finding out what was going on, I paused the Baseball Today podcast on my iPod and joined the crowd at the supermarket.

What I had stumbled upon was perhaps more Chinese even than the crowd at the roller rink. One by one, college-aged kids got on the stage and sang Chinese pop songs. They were introduced by an MC of sorts, handed a microphone, and cheered by the five or six friends they had brought to watch them sing. The song’s music video played on a big white screen behind the singer, along with the lyrics for karaoke. There may have been a prize of some sort for the winning singer, but I left before it was awarded.

The scene was a bit like the Chinese equivalent of the parking-lot rap battle in “8 Mile.” I wouldn’t expect any of the contestants to be signed by a record label, but there’s something nice about the idea of living in a town where dozens of people stand outside a supermarket to watch a karaoke contest on a Saturday night.